Quotes from Dave East

My standout moment I would have to say was when 'Black Rose' dropped and getting the co-sign from Nas and The LOX. I would say all those moments together were crazy for me.

My journey is self-made because I came from nothing. It's the best feeling now, because I don't really feel like I owe anybody.

I never thought I'd be sitting across the table with the owner of Hennessy.

Growing up in Harlem, I was always in the parks playing ball.

I'm still an athlete at heart, so I always want that comfort and something that feels like an athletic shoe.

I got it tatted on me, 'born broke, die rich.'

Honestly, I want to make more music for the women. I rather have a show full of girls, but I still gotta talk about what I be personally going through, what I've gone through, and what the homies go through.

I wanna be in a movie, I wanna have a clothing line, I wanna put myself in a position where, when I'm dead and gone, or I can't rap anymore, that's still moving. Tupac and Biggie, they've been dead 10-plus years and people talk about them everyday. I'm gonna try to speak everything into existence. I know the music is my key to get there.

I wanna go to every country on the Earth.

I wouldn't tell nobody to sign no slave deal or sign your life away or nothing like that, but if the deal is right and if it benefits you, you'd be a fool if you did not take advantage of it.

I stand out. I don't really think I fit in with the 'what rap is' today. I feel like I stand out because I'm talking about me and my homies and stories from my life. I ain't really trying to have you turnt up all day.

I was incarcerated for a little while in Baltimore, and my celly was Muslim. I was watching him pray every day, and his outlook on getting out of that situation was a lot more positive than the other dudes that were Muslim in the jail.

I feel like I've mastered Dave East. For a long time I was trying to figure out who I was and what sound I wanted to come with.

Spanish Harlem is like every ghetto in America. There's every distraction possible. To make it up out of there is really a task itself.

I feel like rap fit me better. I could hoop. I could have went and did that, but this is my lifestyle, my temperament, my mentality.

I'm never really trying to focus on one aim.

It took mad failures for me to start to win.

When I go back to my hood, Queens, Brooklyn, or here in L.A., the people that's not famous, that's what inspires me.

After the first three or four years of me taking rap seriously, it started to look more promising. I started booking shows and more people were playing my music, so I starting believing this could actually work for me.

I always wanted to do something I knew I could love to wake up and do every day, and rap was just second nature to me, growing up in Harlem. I never really had to try.

The fashion and the rap go hand in hand with New York City.

Where I'm from in Harlem, everybody look like a rapper.

You always hear rappers say they don't write, but they're not really talking about anything.

I think what sets a New York rapper apart from other rappers from other places is just being from New York.